Score another win for Big Labor at the expense of employee freedom. Yesterday in New York, Governor David Paterson signed a law making union dues mandatory for public employees who choose to refrain from union membership.

In the past, the law authorizing union bosses to force public employees to pay up as a requirement of keeping their job would expire every two years. The union boss spin is almost unbelievable:

[Union bosses] said on Wednesday that making the law permanent guaranteed that unions would have the money to adequately represent members and nonmembers alike, which they were required to do under a state law known as the Taylor Law. “In public employment, they have the right not to belong, but I still must represent them,” said Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers. “If under the law we’re obligated to represent every employee, then it’s only fair that every employee pays something toward the cost of being represented.”

Iannuzzi’s language is fairly typical among union officials (they frequently use the term "fair share" to describe the dues they seize from nonmembers to pay for unwanted "representation"). But painting union bosses as hapless victims of the very special privileges they got enacted is absolutley absurd. Exclusive representation — monopoly bargaining — is a statutory power given to unions precisely because union bosses lobbied for it.

I’d love to call Iannuzzi’s bluff — will he and other union bosses actually consent to lifting federal and state laws which give unions the special privilege of monopoly bargaining? If they had a beef with the Taylor Law, why not just petition the state to repeal the offensive portions? No, instead, the union despots demanded even more privileges — the power to line their pockets and entrench compuslory unionism.

Unfortunately, Republicans in the state Senate — after years of refusing to make forced dues for nonmembers permanent — gave in to Big Labor’s demands:

The Legislature overwhelmingly approved the bill last month. Similar bills had passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly before, only to fail in the Senate. But with Republicans in a pitched battle to preserve their thin majority in the Senate, the party seemed unwilling to block a priority of organized labor. It passed the Senate last month by a 62-to-0 vote. The Assembly approved it 140 to 5.

Clearly, New York State Senate Republicans have abandoned principle for politics. But the leftist union bosses are always ungrateful — if they get a chance to replace any of these Republican appeasers with a union-backed Democrat, they’ll do it without hesitation.